Best apps for life under lockdown

The SuperCook app finds recipes from its database of over 1 million recipes using items that you currently have in your store cupboard so you do not need to go out at all for any ingredients to make a meal. I added all the items I currently have at home including spices and have discovered 21,600 new meal ideas from the app.

The Fridge Food app gives you easy to find recipe ideas from items in your fridge. This app contains 13,000 recipes which can be bookmarked for later. Useful for finding recipes from items in your fridge to cook right now.

The NYT Cooking app gives you inspiration to cook over recipes in different styles – all curated and tested and published in the NY Times. Instructions are easy to follow and you can save items in your favourites which are organised logically.

If you find yourself with more time than usual as you no longer need to commute to your workplace, try the Seven – 7 minute workout app. You can create workouts based on your own needs and complete a workout in seven minutes with no extra equipment. It might become a nice seven minute habit once your quarantine is over.

If you sit at your desk for long periods every day and miss the exercise you used to get, try the Office workout Exercises app. You can do simple exercises every hour and build a custom workout suited for you. There are 18 different workout exercises you can try during your working day.

If you have never tried yoga, then you can try the Daily Yoga Postures for the Office app. You can learn stretching and rotating joints to relieve stress when you are sitting down all day in a cramped space. Most of the exercises can be done whilst you are sitting on your office chair and designed for beginners who are new to yoga.

Try meditation with the Stop, Breathe & Think app to reduce your stress and help you sleep better. focusing on taking care of yourself through mindful breathing and mental wellbeing the app will help you stay calm and focus on mindfulness and encourage you to try daily meditations to calm your mind.

The Calm meditation app helps you meditate with guided sessions lasting from 3 to 25 minutes. The sessions focus on a variety of topics to keep you grounded, reduce your anxiety, or forgiving. The app also gives you relaxation techniques and music so you can relax before going to sleep.

Guided meditation can help you escape your current anxieties by taking you away from what is happening around you. The Let's Meditate app has techniques to help you relax and offers a variety of content to help you calm,  meditate every day and soothe your stresses away.

Learn to play the piano and gain new skills with the Real Piano app. This app has an interactive piano keyboard to help you learn chords across 7 octaves, and develop your skills. A range of different musical instruments will give you different sounds whilst you learn.

There has never been a better time to learn a new skill, so if you have ever fancied writing your own song – but find the lyrics hard to complete – try the Write your own Song Rhymes Finder app. It suggests a rhyming word from a database of 470,000 English words to expand your creative efforts.

Learn to write a novel with the Novelist app. The app takes you through all of the elements of the story in a structured methodology  and helps you plot your bestseller.

To exercise your mind, try a new puzzle – one you have never tried. You could learn to solve cryptic crosswords with the Best Cryptic Crossword app to really stretch the logic connections in your brain.

Once you have managed to solve a couple of simple clues and got your head around how they work, you will start to enjoy them. Stick with it!

If you like numbers, you probably already love Sudoku – but if not, why don't you give it a go using the Sudoku app? No more rubbing out pencil marks on paper – this app can tell you when you have made an error – useful for beginners, and take you from beginner to advanced with a range of puzzles.

Logical puzzlers will love the Nonograms app which has pictorial crosswords for you to solve. The numbers at the edges of the grid show you which squares to colour in to reveal the hidden picture leaving the relevant squares blank.

Discover new songs and rediscover old ones with the SoundHound app.  Any song you discover can be played on the YouTube music player, and can be added to your Spotify playlist for you to return to later. But best of all, if you have an earworm - yet can't remember which song it is - the app will try and identify it for you, and stop driving you crazy.

Get your music collection catalogued and organised with the My Music Organiser app. This app enables you to organise and manage your music collection and keep track of the music you own. You can finally catalog and organise every track you own – and stop yourself from buying duplicates  when you are out at a record fair.

The Scala app connects to your Spotify app and suggests new music based on your personal Spotify preferences. If you like any of the suggested songs, add them to the playlist. It enables you to broaden your horizons and discover new music that otherwise would have passed you by.

 If, after all these suggestions, you still have nothing to do – but are open to ideas, try the Bored app. The button generates a range of ideas for all ages for you to try. You never know, you might find something to take you out of the doldrums.

Ask yourself – or others in lockdown a set of challenging questions with the What if app. Some of them are personal, or the questions could spark debate amongst the members of your lockdown household. There are 100,000 questions to challenge you, and pass the time. A nice little app for passing the time.

Get prepared for a long time in lockdown by planning and managing your vegetable garden with the My Vegetable Garden App. From finding seeds, do growing instructions even planting your virtual garden. it will help you stay organised with your real – and your virtual - garden. It will even remind you when to water your plants.

The DIY project ideas app will give you some inspiration for projects for your home or garden Most of the ideas can simply be done with readily available items to hand. The app also offers comprehensive instructions for the project.

The Toss – Declutter app gives you tasks to complete each day with ideas to declutter your home. The app will even track the number of items that you have chucked, recycled, or put into the charity box. you can even create your own tasks to complete.

If you look around your walls feeling that your life is messy – try the How to be Organised app. It walks you through steps you can take to become more organised, shares habits of organised people and shows you how to organise your life.  It provides topics to help you get on top of things and get more organised on a daily basis.